Profiling would help with airport security

Profiling would help with airport security

By WILLIAM CARD

Davon Gray’s piece [“Our rights and the new realities”] on Nov. 29 brought into focus how our Republic will die.
We will not go out in a blaze of glory but rather with a whimper as we surrender yet another right guaranteed by our Founding Fathers. With our First and Second Amendment rights constantly under siege, an unelected and unassailable group of federal bureaucrats now has taken away our Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable searches and seizures at all our airports and threaten to do the same at train stations. The feeble protestations about safety are absurd.

Beyond this, Gray admits that profiling might help as long as we don’t look at race or religion. Of course those appear to be the only reliable profiling criteria that would have snagged every single one of the perpetrators of aerial violence for the past three decades. Though skin hue varies slightly, all of the perpetrators have two things in common: They were young Muslim males. Profiling for these characteristics is ruled out by Gray.
No American has blown up or commandeered a commercial aircraft bent on mass murder. Yet Americans make up the overwhelming majority whom the TSA is groping, delaying and inconveniencing.

The simplest and most effective way to deal with this problem would be to put in an “express lane” in every airport to deal with people who don’t blow up or steal airplanes. That group encompasses virtually every American. At a minimum, we could fast-track air crew, holders of American-issued passports, and all active duty and retired U.S. military.

We could safely throw in all active and retired policemen, firemen, DEA, FBI, federal marshals, local sheriffs and EMT professionals and volunteers. No American school teacher, plumber, businessman or woman, chef, or crossing guard has tried to steal or blow up an airplane.
The point is that there is a tiny portion of the flying population that is both suspect and readily identifiable. They aren’t Americans.
With that said, I would subject journalists to extra screening regardless of their country of origin.
We shouldn’t put a happy face on the loss of sovereign American rights, we should resist. This ain’t rocket science unless you turn it over to the government. Then the readily apparent somehow becomes unfathomable and opaque. The “new reality” is the government is taking away our rights. That needs to stop.